Too much of everything

This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Great Film overall

Expected more

This is an absolute great movie.It's a big Hollywood cliché about the bad companies leaders who can indirectly kill people if that can give their more money and power.BUT the poor citizens can fight back and get them in court.But it's very enjoyable.Lot of action, lot of thrill, and a bit of love.Conclusion : money rules everything, but fight makes freedom.It's a very good film with plenty of emotions.I loved it.If you like to fight for the truth, the jungle, the adventure and the special forces, watch this film.

A Dark Truth (2012)An ambitious movie, intending more than it achieves. At stake is a critique of the corporate cornering of water rights in the Third World. This is a real problem, and deserves better than this by Hollywood, if a big movie is the way to go about it. (A far better attempt, and a far better movie, is "También la lluvia", or "Even the Rain," set in Bolivia and starring Gael García Bernal.)The really great actor here is Forest Whitaker, who has a fairly small role as a South American rebel leader with a true conscience. The lead actor is the ever-struggling (if sincere) Andy Garcia, who is a retired South American CIA man with a quasi-political radio talk show to keep him and his troubled wife and child alive and very well. You can smell the connection that has to be made here, between Whitaker's jungle world of righteous rebellion and Garcia's safely withdrawn world of buried political misdeeds. The third world (narratively) is the big water purification company itself, with a slightly evil corporate head and his slow-to-wake sister who finally realizes the corporation their father started is corrupt and murderous. This third leg of the triangle is complex, and a bit unconvincing with its too-easy array of killers and corporate spies and Ecuadorian accomplices all a cell phone call away.I might make clear here the movie is not a dud but it's very troubled, both formally (editing and writing issues, mostly) and in terms of its purported content. That is, ultra-violent scenes of mass murder are used over and over again to press home how ruthless and bloody the corporate heads are, safe in their glassed offices in Toronto. (Yes, the corporation is Canadian, which I guess is a nice novelty since Canadians are so famously nice.) The actual problem of water use and clean water supplies for the villages shown is never explored. Instead we have people running and getting gunned down with weirdly nonsensical abandon. A lot.The more you dwell on this the more you realize the movie makers are as evil as the corporate bosses they are portraying. They use this horrifying cinematic mayhem to draw you in and make you (in theory) sympathize with the rebels, and with the ordinary people who just want to live and have clean water. Well, of course! So then we get back to Garcia drawn to the jungle to single-handedly (with a revolver) save these rebels from the advancing army troops. (Yes, Andy Garcia plays the Matt Damon character here, which is really quite funny at times, and not on purpose.)So eventually you see through all the seriousness to a pretty poorly cobbled together movie with lots of overlapping plots and some very very fast solutions to messy problems (like getting the wanted rebel leader out of Ecuador on an airplane without a blink). I'd skip this mess for lots of reasons. And go see "Even the Rain" with its much gentler flaws.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday MorningA water firm has fitted a faulty pump in a village in Ecuador, that has caused an outbreak of typhus that started with the general population, before moving on to the military, who went berserk and started shooting the inhabitants. Former CIA agent turned talk show host Jack Begosian (Andy Garcia) is approached to travel to Ecuador and find rebel leader Francisco Francis (Forest Whitaker) who broke in to their offices and took some sensitive data. But with their dirty secret potentially being exposed, the company will stop at nothing to seek a more favorable outcome.Corporate corruption is at the heart of this above average straight to DVD thriller, which casts an intelligent glance over how the names and brands we've come to love have a dark reality behind them. From the outset, it's clear we're dealing with a superior effort from a very hit and miss crop, with ambition and scope sourly lacking from many other such entries, providing some serious food for thought and really requiring your attention throughout.But what really makes it stand out is the lead performance from Garcia, who proves you can still care about your work even if the pay isn't so good and it will raise your profile a lot less. He injects his role here with a steely, quiet intensity that somehow manages to hold your attention throughout. Co star Whitaker also refuses to sleepwalk through his role, and a host of other co stars, including Eva Longoria, add a nice topping to the cake. All of this is wonderful, even in light of the relentlessly heavy, humourless tone.This is the kind of more high scale production that is sadly being pushed to the sidelines in these recessionary times, in favour of more low brow, bigger budget crowd pleasing stuff. In more favourable times, it would have gotten the theatrical release it at least deserved. ***

Whatever vices or virtues this movie has, it is a paean of really vicious hate propaganda against free market economics. The corporation in the story is blamed for an atrocious massacre which is actually committed by the Ecuadorian army, for a typhus outbreak and for the usual, general perversity and greediness that corporations are characterized with in this type of hate propaganda. I can only imagine what an Ecuadorian would think of the way his country is portrayed in this garbage can full of lies disguised as fiction. I would avoid watching this kind of trash if I could see it coming. Why don't movie reviews routinely include a commentary on the propaganda content of movies like this?